Parents' Forum

“A ban on parents smoking in front of their children is being considered by the Government.” (The Daily Telegraph, Monday, December 14, 2009). How does this work? Does the government put CCTV into all parents’ houses? Is there a phone line for neighbours to shop you? Is it OK to smoke in your bedroom if you lock the door and your children are not in front of you? Do your children get taken away if you do smoke in front of them? Can you smoke in front of other people’s children?

But of course this is a crusade of the mind, rather than a practical one. It is another nail in the coffin to the idea that parents should see themselves as human beings with their own vices, otlooks and concerns. Parents should only see themselves as determiners of outcomes for their children and behave in the way that society dictates-no matte r how unfounded the rational behind the dictates of acceptable behaviours are. And of course…another nail in the coffin that there should be any notion of locked doors-if you have children all should be open to scrutiny.

So I’m participating in the local Santa chatter this year. It’s usually along the lines of how does one negotiate the question of two religions in a household, what about the kids at school who say he doesn’t exist, what if we’re atheists, kind of thing. But this year the discussion has taken a slightly different, and to my mind, disturbing turn for the worse. It’s not so much that some parents aren’t playing along with Santa, it’s why they’re not playing along. They don’t want to “do” Santa because it’s “wrong to lie” to the children.

Now just to say from the outset, I LOVE Santa and Christmas with every humanist bone in my body. They will have to pry the holly from my cold dead hand before I give up on Christmas. But I do recognise that not everyone celebrates the holiday (although I personally think we all should – it’s about as religious as The Grinch and the return of the light after the solstice is a universal symbol of hope) and there’s no reason why, whatever a family celebrates, it shouldn’t be a magical occasion for the kids – Santa or no Santa. But to eschew Santa because it’s dishonest seems to me to miss the whole point.

Not only do I think it’s okay to lie to kids. I think it’s important to lie to them. Lies we tell to children are really more like over simplifications. Because, as Jack “St” Nicholas says in  A Few Good Men, they “can’t handle the truth”. There are things they need to know something but not everything about.  There are things they don’t need to know about and shouldn’t know about until they are adults.  And Santa?  Santa is in a class of his own.

To ban Santa on the principle  that we some how owe it to them not to participate in The Myth of Santa isn’t just an awfully worthy and rather kill joy thing to do, it undermines one of the last vestiges of the distinction between kids and adults. Santa Claus is a vast adult conspiracy carried out on behalf of the next generation. It’s a tacit agreement that for a few years we will give our children the gift of fancy. We’ll make keep faith with their belief in magic and collectively make it real.  For me, this is one of the most genuinely miraculous things about Christmas and to see it eroded this way is a bad tiding indeed.  Bah! Humbug!

There is a good article by Michele Ledda on the Guardian site, here.

This is from Marie:

I totally agree with your posting on the site that the time has come for some kind of Parents’ Liberation Movement . However I wonder whether this would advocate ‘freedom’; for the choices of a diverse range of parenting styles , or is there in truth a particular ‘model’ which is considered more ‘acceptable’ within the PLM forum?

In the work I do (mostly family support work as a volunteer, but also attending some discussion events when family policies are discussed by academics etc ) I’ve observed that newer ways of arranging family life (role reversal/stay at home dads; shared care; both parents in work and using paid childcare etc etc ) are all very acceptable, politically correct and encouraged by the ’system’ .

However there’s one model i.e the so-called ‘traditional’ or ‘old-fashioned’ way (extremely unfortunate and misleading use of language in my view) which is persistently slated by various commentators as retrogade or unenlightened. In my view we need to find a new, more modern narrative for those parents where one goes out to work while the other stays at home to do the hands-on caring for a few years (usually the mother and often out of free choice / following their instincts) – ie this is not going back to the 50s, it is merely an equally valid option taken by free-thinking parents in 2009 in full recognition of the range of choices they may hopefully have, often taking a drastic cut in salary in order to ‘be there’. Of course for many parents there are no options whatsoever (under the current system many couples both have to work to meet the monthly mortgage, as do many single parents, whilst some parent-carers simply don’t have any work or childcare options open to them, but these are separate challenges than need to be addressed in their own way ) .

How far do we wish to liberate parents from the expectations put upon them to ‘parent’ in a particular way? Are we ready for the full range of possibilities and prepared to equally accept that mothers at home, in particular mothers (as everyone likes to see a full time dad) are taking an equally ‘valid’ route?

I think the term ‘parent liberation’ only applies if we are prepared to accept that our choices may not be the choices of others, and that there is strength in the diversity of the full range of parenting approaches. For example I do not home educate our own children full time (I’ve noted that home education is the next topic of discussion), but I do believe we are all home-educators – like it or not, most of us do it part-time around a more formal school day. Some of our friends have taken the full-time home education route and I personally believe they should be entitled to their own family culture, as long as the children are thriving. There is no one size fits all and long may it stay that way, or what a boring world it would be.

We don’t want to be told what to do – we are parents who can think for ourselves. But if PLM imposes a certain culture of its own, then this would be counter-productive would it not? (And I’m not suggesting that this is the case, merely asking for clarification). All too often the dialogue is led by academics, professionals (I call them the ‘gatekeepers of information’) but we need to embrace as many different experiences of parenting as possible and this will include people who don’t think /write/produce reports for a living. Many people have interesting ‘ideas’ even though they may not necessarily be used to articulating them, or to being approached for their views on family life ). I hope the above comments are constructive – I am very excited about the idea of a Parents Liberation Movement, but needed some clarification re what stage we are at… I hope to make a meeting in London sometime, but it can be difficult to get there on a regular basis.

Could the fevered climate of concern about children’s safety be reaching its limits? Maybe.

This month the Maclaren stroller company issued a massive “recall” of every stroller sold in the United States since 1999 because of reports that 14 children had, over the years amputated fingers when they caught them in the hinges of the stroller.

Of course no one likes the thought of separating kiddie-digits from their owners but warnings about the dangers of the stroller pushed at the limits of credulity.

A few days before the story broke, the Park Slope Parents Yahoo!Group I help to run began receiving messages about the impending recall that sent me and my fellow moderators scrambling to the urban legend web site, Snopes.com to see if it was for real. The messages we received, which originated from the “Baby Bargains Blog”, the counterpart to an annual guide to baby gear, exhorted parents to “Stop using all Maclaren strollers RIGHT NOW—yes, every model made since 1999”.

Stop using the stroller? IMMEDIATELY? It seemed plausible, then again it was rather like receiving a message telling us to stop using car doors or party balloons or drinking straws, all of which have the potential to inflict serious injury under certain circumstances. And then of course, these dangerous hinges had been in use for more than a decade. We scoured the web, half expecting to find it listed, along with “Help Find Little Ashley Flores and other mainstays of the Internet rumour mill. But ‘lo, it turned out to be true and Maclaren’s press release 24 hours later, did actually instruct parents to stop using the stroller until they could install the free hinge shield.

A seemed like a major safety panic was on the cards. The New York Times coverage was typical. They dispatched a young, (young-looking, at least) reporter Andrew Keh to my neighborhood where he managed to find a woman in the Starbucks who had stopped using the stroller until the hinge cover arrived and claimed “nobody I know is using it. Nobody wants to be that person.” She also put the menace of the stroller on a par with Swine Flu. Only a few parents, who did not wish to be identified for fear for being labeled “bad parents” said they thought it was all a bit over the top. The headline of the story read “Stroller Recall Stirs Unease in Park Slope” and seemed to confirm that most parents were more than a little rattled. But were they? Passing dozens of Maclaren strollers in the days that followed the recall, I wasn’t so sure.

I decided to conduct my own unscientific poll of people from our parenting list to find out just how just worried Maclaren users really are. Answer? Not so much.

Of the 51 parents who answered my survey, only one had stopped using the stroller entirely. Most had ordered the hinge shield but were continuing to use the stroller and just under half weren’t going to bother ordering the shield at all. Some, like this woman explained, “The only reason I ordered the covers or whatever they are (I’m not completely sure.) is to maybe pass on the stroller when we’ve outgrown it. ”

Some were annoyed by the press coverage.

One observed “I have not seen a shortage in Maclaren use at all on the slope. Just because we’re American and live in Park Slope doesn’t mean we’re nuts.”

Another said she “Can’t wait for someone to write a reasonable piece about this. Not that it’s newsworthy, really, to begin with, but still. The Times had that dumbass shark-bait piece, and then the blogs had this whole thing scolding PS parents for not reacting ENOUGH. Pleeeeease!”

The main thing that struck me about the responses was the sheer reasonableness of them along with some healthy skepticism about hysterical nature of the recall.

“if the company knows it product has/can cause injury, then it should let people know about it. Who would have thought our little one could lose their fingers? I also own a toybox that could amputate a little finger if jumped on when the fingers are inside, but it is nice and does the job…..hope all my kids make it to adult hood with all of their fingers!”

and,

“My daughters finger actually got caught in the MacLaren when it was being unfolded a few years ago. It was scary, but her finger was fine. Since then, we’ve just been more careful. I equate it to fingers near a car door or drawer or anything. I will eventually order the fix so I can pass the stroller along when I’m done with it, but I’m so not worried about this even after we had a close call.”

Or

“I think the concern about this is directly related to how many time you open/close your stroller. We almost never collapse it, except for a rare car ride, so I wasn’t as worried as I might be if I had a younger child or folded/unfolded the stroller more often. I still ordered the stupid shield!”

and,

“I am going to put on the shield when we receive it, now that I know about the risks. BUT I’ve never had my kid involved in collapsing the stroller anyway. (Out of curiosity, couldn’t the work of the “shield” also be accomplished with duct tape?)”

My favorite comment came from a woman who told me,

“The irony was, on the day of the announcement of the recall, my husband put away the Maclaren until we could get the replacement piece. Instead, he got out the Baby Trend jogging stroller to take our 2 yr old out, then proceeded to seriously jam his thumb in the folding mechanism as he was opening it. He suffered two long, deep lacerations that required stitches, scary bruising and swelling, and almost 2 weeks later, still some nerve damage. It just shows, accidents happen!”

Accidents do happen and it may be that somewhere in the world someone is terribly worried about MacLaren strollers but there’s not much sign of it where I am.

 How did the New York Times (and others) get it so wrong? Why was Maclaren’s recall so over heated? Why weren’t the strollers recalled in the UK? Why no panic? Have we finally reached the limits of these sorts of scares? What do you think?

There’s a thought-provoking article by Minette Marrin in yesterday’s Sunday Times, here. Her basic point is that people with severe learning disabilities should not have children, because of the difficulties involved in raising them and the cost to the state of the necessary care.

I do have a small measure of sympathy for her frustration with the approach often taken by the disabled lobby, which creates this fantasy that disability is in everybody else’s minds and that disabled people have the ‘right’ to have children – I think this approach consistently whitewashes the practical difficulties confronting disabled people, which does not help them at all. But I am more disturbed by the logic of her argument, as follows:

‘There is a growing body of evidence (across the entire population) that children whose homes are talk-poor, whose parents can’t or don’t communicate with them well and who can’t make careful plans and boundaries for them or help them with schoolwork, are children brought up to serious distress and exclusion.

‘It is hard enough to be an adequate parent with supposedly normal intelligence. For someone of very low intelligence it is even harder.’

This seems to me to be Marrin’s own version of the argument that disability is just a version of ability, or ‘normality’ – and hints that the presumed welfare of the child should be used to counter the desire of parents who are not brainy / educated to have children. Personally, I think it’s rubbish that the best parents are the most intelligent ones. Where do we put the balance on this?

By Jennie Bristow

(Reprinted from Spiked Online 16 November 2009)

A new report by the British think-tank Demos has hit the headlines, with its claim that ‘Parents are the principal architects of a fairer society’. Based on research from the Millennium Cohort Study, the report argues that how children are parented has a more significant impact upon their future life chances than just about anything else, including poverty and the social class into which they are born (1).

You might wonder whether the world really needs another report blaming particular parenting styles for every evident problem in late capitalist society. Across the British political spectrum, policy continually seeks to clobber parents over the head with the assertion that the future of Britain rests or falls according to whether they feed their children too many sweets or read to them for the requisite number of minutes at bedtime.

So when Jen Lexmond and Richard Reeves, authors of the Demos report, respond to concerns about interference by the ‘nanny state’ by arguing that ‘if there is one area where government intervention is justified, it is in precisely the area of life signalled by the term “nannying” – the development of children’s capabilities’, they are pushing at doors opened by New Labour, and held open by the Tories. Nothing new there.

However, Lexmond and Reeves at least try to go beyond the emotional blackmail that informs most parenting policy, which simply asserts that if you don’t adopt the right kind of parenting behaviours with your children they will die of obesity or end up on the social scrapheap, with no qualifications and a million mental disorders. Their report, Building Character, is an attempt to wrestle with the problem of how we bring up children with a sense of self and agency, who can achieve things in life and develop a responsibility to people and projects outside of themselves.

This is an important question, and one that preoccupies parents as much as policy-wonks. I have often found myself ploughing through the latest piece of official parenting advice and wondering to what end it all leads. The idea that rearing children is just about maximising their ‘happiness’, or stopping them from becoming fat, or enabling them to take a few calculated risks, might all make some sense on a personal, daily level, but it seems thoroughly inadequate in terms of a generational project.

When we say ‘children are the future’, we don’t just mean that they will outlive us, but that they will be the ones running society and making history. To that extent, it really is not enough that they are happy or that they have high self-esteem – they have to be able to cope with adversity and think outside of themselves, in order to shape the world around them. This is where character comes into play, and where adults’ role in helping to ‘build character’ is crucially important.

Unfortunately, while Demos’ enthusiasm for addressing this issue is refreshing, its narrow focus on parenting styles and outcomes among young children means that the report ends up peddling the same old mixture of common sense and nonsense. On the common sense front, it finds that more authoritative parents have better-behaved children and that more confident parents are more authoritative. On the nonsense front, it speculates that better-behaved children with more confident parents will get to be middle class when they reach adulthood – which leads to the conclusion that training parents on low incomes to be confident and authoritative will magic some social mobility into their children. Or, as Jen Lexmond told The Sunday Times, ‘when it comes to parenting, it is not what you are, but what you do that’s important’ (2).

What is striking about this is not only the blithe assertion that all manner of social inequalities and life problems can be obliterated by parents simply setting a few house rules for their toddlers. It is the reduction of a child’s moral development, the building of character that takes place over the course of childhood within a distinct cultural context, to a particular parenting style that results in clearly observable attributes amongst five-year-olds.

Building Character starts with a discussion of Aristotle; eight pages later it presents us with a table showing how three ‘key character capabilities’ are exhibited by the behaviour of five-year-olds studied by the Millennium Cohort Study. So we find that a child who ‘cannot sit still, is constantly fidgeting or squirming’ shows something about ‘application’, a child who is kind to younger children shows something about ‘empathy and attachment’, and a child who ‘often argues with adults’ shows something about ‘self-regulation’. The child who exhibits the good behaviours is presumed to be a product of authoritative parenting, and will go far in life; the restless hypochondriac tantrummer is presumed to be lacking boundaries and will end up socially immobile.

An expert in survey methodology could no doubt find several holes in this research. I was struck by the admission, in the appendix, that for all the authors argued that confident parents make better-behaved (or more character-ful) children, ‘It is possible that the association between parental perceived competence and child behaviour outcomes is spurious’ – as the data was based on parents’ reports of their children’s behaviour, and less confident parents tend to report more bad behaviour in their children than do more confident parents. It seems equally possible that the report’s entire evidence base is ‘spurious’.

But aside from that, why do we think we can measure something so complex and human as ‘character’ by looking at the behaviour of five-year-olds? Can human agency really be reduced to an ability to concentrate and a willingness to share toys?

As a parent, I worry about the development of my children’s characters. I worry about the impact of a purportedly child-centred therapy culture, which encourages children to think that that they should never be criticised and that their feelings are the most important ones. I worry that children who are over-protected, who are not allowed to take risks or work through problems for themselves, are profoundly ill-equipped to become adults capable of running the world. I worry that the educational direction taken by ‘personalised learning’ and methods that make everything fun and relevant to children limits their capacity to apply themselves to things.

I worry about the way that anti-bullying initiatives actively discourage children from developing empathy, by presenting bullying as the use of certain bad words or particular actions, rather than encouraging children to think about what it means to be kind or unkind, how to roll with the blows and how to maintain friendships. I worry that precisely the model of ‘good parenting’ that is advocated by policymakers is that of the active consumer – the parent who elbows everybody else out of the way to achieve the best for his or her child, who is obsessively anxious about the individuals within his or her family to the exclusion of thinking about what’s best for the school, the community, even other friends and family members. And I worry about lots of other things as well.

But, as the parent of a five-year-old and a three-year-old, I know that their characters are not yet fully formed. There are several years and many experiences left in order to inspire and shape young children into the kind of adults we hope they will become. As children gain the ability to read, reason and expand their world beyond the home, we can engage them in questions of agency and morality, and trust them to work things out for themselves but in relation to other people.

The idea that parents alone can – even should – short-circuit these processes by seeking to ‘develop character’ by the end of five, and that we can measure our children’s worth as moral, responsible beings according to whether they sit still at the dinner table, displays a narrow and deterministic view. Character is not an ‘outcome measure’, and obedience is not what makes us human.

Jennie Bristow edits the website Parents With Attitude. She is author of Standing Up To Supernanny, and co-author of Licensed to Hug.

Read on:

A guide to subversive parenting

(1) Building Character, by Jen Lexmond and Richard Reeves, November 2009. Download it for free (PDF).

(2) Bad parents kills prospects of working class, The Sunday Times, 8 November 2009

I was struck by this latest development in that horrible case of the nursery workers who abused the children in their care:

‘At the latest hearing at Bristol Crown Court Judge Royce said: “If parents want to find out whether their child has been abused, then they should be in a position to do so.

“If they don’t want to know, and I fully understand why some parents should not want to know, then the information should not be thrust upon them. It should be a parental choice.”‘

I can see what the judge is getting at – if I were in this situation, I can imagine really not wanting to know. But isn’t it weird to put this in terms of ‘parental choice’? It seems, like many of the choices were are given as parents (schools, which hospital to go to, etc) this is hardly a choice; more like being stuck between a rock and a hard place.  It also seems to put the onus on parents to make this tough decision, which looks like an abdication of responsibility to me.

Also as a consequence of this horrible case, a friend has just told me that her nursery has now banned parents from using mobile phones inside the building.  Seems like an example of feeling the need to bring in a new rule as a reaction to anything happening – despite the lack of any relationship between this case and parents using their phones!

This was posted by Jennifer Howze on the Times’s Alpha Mummy blog yesterday:

Parenthood, how do love thee? Let us count the ways.

* Strangers who grope your belly during pregnancy and discuss whether you’re gaining the “right” kind of weight (assumedly not the kind you get from eating that Mars bar you’re holding right there)

* Supermarket cashiers who out of sheer selflessness and concern call security when you try to buy wine and unpasteurised cheese during pregnancy

* Researchers who have determined that by letting your children watch CBeebies while you did the laundry you have basically allowed their brains to eat themselves

 * Parenting experts who confirm that by picking up your baby too much/too little that you have condemned them to a lifetime of malformed personal relationships and a career working in a film rental store. A porn film rental store.

* Government officials who create 12-point systems to have your child reading English at Oxford by age two as long as you do these flash cards at home every night for 3 hours. You’re doing the flash cards, right?

Let’s face it, it’s hard enough keeping up with all the advice on parenthood – you can barely fit in a half hour with the little tykes after reading it all. The overall climate for parents is one of judgement and expert opinion, particularly the kind that reverses itself every political cycle.

Isn’t it time that we threw off our shackles, rose up and became free mums and dads? I’ll be debating the topic at the Battle of Ideas this weekend.

On Sunday at 3:30 I’m appearing on a roundtable discussion about why we need a parents’ liberation movement, along with the Guardian’s Zoe Williams, the Institute of Ideas’ Jane Sanderman and chair Jennie Bristow, author of Standing Up to Supernanny. 

You can still get tickets to the Battle, which runs over Saturday and Sunday. It’s a real jolt to the intellect with discussions on everything from chav-bashing and the problem with air travel to football rivalry and India’s future: slumdogs or millionaires? What’s best about these sessions is that the audience really takes part – it’s not just a bunch of people on a stage talking at you. Anyone with an opinion can jump in.

Come down for high-spirited discussions and tell us whether you think parents need to be released from their bonds.

http://www.battleofideas.org.uk

Just when you thought there was  no more room in the curriculum…

The Sleep Council are proposing that children get lessons in sleep (to counter parental ignorance of course about how much sleep children require). What do you think the learning outcome would be?

“http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article6885868.ece”>